Executive Interview Series: Mortimer Singer on Rebuilding the Foundation of Prestige Beauty Manufacturing

Today we’re speaking with Mortimer Singer, Chairman of Mana Products and Co-Managing Partner of Traub Capital Partners, the leading lower middle market consumer specialized private equity buyout firm in the United States. In 2020 TCP acquired Mana Products, the leading custom formulator and contract manufacturer for prestige beauty and skincare brands. As the driving force behind TCP’s growth strategy, Morty leads the areas of the firm in building value through active operational engagement, strategic brand positioning, and deep consumer industry insight.

Mana had been a family-owned business with over 40 years of heritage, a blue-chip customer base, and the kind of manufacturing stickiness that’s difficult to replicate. Under TCP’s stewardship, Mana has undergone targeted transformation across facilities, organizational structure, a hybrid category focus, and commercial strategy—making it a textbook example of strategic private equity at work.

We spoke with Morty about the acquisition, the challenges, and what it takes to modernize a legacy manufacturer into a 21st-century beauty platform.

Q: Morty, what was the original investment thesis behind Mana Products?

A: The business had a few key things we look for: long-term relationships with high-quality customers, proprietary formulations that drive customer retention, and a manufacturing base with real capacity—but underutilized and under-optimized.

Mana had historically been family-run and was operating on legacy infrastructure, with siloed decision-making and limited commercial agility. But underneath that was a well-invested platform with decades of formulation R&D and strong brand equity in the contract manufacturing world.

Our thesis was simple: this business didn’t need reinvention; it needed modernization and alignment. We saw an opportunity to bring in systems, structure, and cross-functional execution without disrupting what made the business great.

Q: What were the most immediate operational priorities post-close?

A: First, we addressed organizational design. The company had outgrown its founder-led structure. We brought in a new CEO and CFO with deep manufacturing and private equity experience and implemented a matrixed org structure to promote cross-functional collaboration.

Second, we re-prioritized the sales and marketing organization. Prior to our ownership, sales were reactive—relationships existed, but there was no forward-looking business development infrastructure. We launched a formal commercial strategy focused on winning new clients, expanding wallet share with existing ones, and reintroducing Mana as a proactive, R&D-led partner. The result is that Mana has emerged as the leader in hybrid formula development which means adding efficacy to color cosmetics and pigment to skincare.

Q: How did you think about category focus—especially in skincare versus color cosmetics?

A: We identified skincare as the high-margin, high-growth segment of the business. When we acquired Mana, skincare represented about 20% of sales. By 2022, that number is closing in on 50%today. That shift was a direct result of allocating R&D resources to the skincare lab, investing in raw material innovation, and aligning our pipeline around post-COVID consumer demand—namely, functional self-care and preventative maintenance products.

Color cosmetics still matters greatly to Mana, but it’s more cyclical and margin-compressed. We didn’t walk away from it, but we did rebalance internal priorities. Skincare gave us stability and margin upside. We structured our project brief process to prioritize briefs with better LTV and clearer path to repeat production. And as I mentioned, emerging as the leader in hybrids was a key outcome.

Q: How did you approach technology and reporting infrastructure inside a historically offline organization?

A: One of the first things we did was implement Redzone across production. That allowed us to track machine-level performance, downtime, output per shift, and bottlenecks. It gave us the granularity to manage day-to-day and create accountability without micromanagement.

We also implemented financial forecasting tools and built KPI dashboards to track backlog, margin contribution by customer, and SKU-level profitability. These were foundational upgrades—without them, strategic planning is guesswork.

What was important is that we didn’t treat these as bolt-ons. We built them into how the business operates. These systems now inform daily standups, weekly management check-ins, and board-level reporting. It’s part of the operating rhythm.

Q: What has changed culturally at Mana since the acquisition?

A: A lot. We are now a client first company. We are single minded about being “the team behind the team” to get them from “startup to stardom”. The culture has shifted from reactive to proactive. We’ve created a more collaborative environment, broken down silos, and shifted toward a team-based execution model. That required not just org chart changes, but deeper alignment on incentives, communication style, and expectations around accountability.

It’s also a more data-driven environment. Gut instinct still matters—but now it’s paired with metrics. That has changed how decisions are made, how people manage time, and how success is measured across teams.

We’ve kept the creative energy and the R&D spirit that made Mana successful. But we’ve wrapped it in structure—and that structure is what’s enabling us to scale.

Q: What does success look like from here for Mana?

A: For us, success is threefold: (1) continued category expansion with anchor customers, particularly in hybrids, skincare, and prestige personal care; (2) margin expansion through procurement, plant optimization, and SKU-level ROI tracking; and (3) being viewed by our customers not just as a manufacturer, but as their key innovation partner.

We’re also building out international capabilities and looking at potential M&A to augment offerings. But everything is grounded in operational fundamentals. Mana has always had the bones of a great business—our job has been to add the muscle.